Religious harms

With all the news about closed polygamous communities and the debates over marriage being religious or secular and who gets to be married and how many spouses can they have, the issue seems to come down to a simple question of which society prevails?

A secular democratic society, where the individuals are the social unit of consequence, and thus are entrusted to make whatever life decisions will allow them to have the freedom to take liberties with whatever makes their life happy while not imposing restrictions or limitations of any one else’s enjoyment of the same secular society.

Or do we allow whatever is the dominant religion to decide for all of us, regardless of individual beliefs?

When we want to know what the danger and social harms that have been wrought by religion and allowing religious leaders to assume the role of King over all who serve, we need only to look back to the 1970s and Jonestown.

Worse, that we haven’t changed since then.

There’s warfare in the middle east, religious extremism on the rise, economic strife, global unrest and constant claims by one religious group or another of the coming ending of the world.

We need to ensure public education not only provides the basic education of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but also to ensure that ever citizen understand their citizenship rights, responsibilities and entitlements – partly to ensure that children have access to legal protective services if need be, but also so that they become socially capable functional people.

At a minimum, able to understand the basic scientific method, critical thinking, and capable to navigate what’s private sovereignty vs public interest.

A tall order, which will not be possible when religious sensibilities are coddled to the point that having a religion is deemed the norm.

Magical thinking is not the basis for understanding or being in the universe. Worse, fighting over magical thinking, oppressing, discriminating and slaughtering people over the details or variations of magical thinking should be thought of as obscene.

Anything that is actually moral, cannot claim a moral as more important than living and breathing people.